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most controversial design decision made in a mmo?
nomadian
Member Posts: 3,490
Everyone knows about the SWG one but what others are there?
Comments
Any expansion pack that dramatically change teh gameplay and force all playerbase to hate the game that love.
DAoC , SWG, Planetside, etc..
Bad expansion packs kill games.
Another one would be when shadow lands came out for AO. I left after that came out.
EQ - Tergan - Retired
EQ2 - Badmortagin - Retired
SWG - Badmortagin - Retired
AO - Badmortagin - Retired
Trammel.
Waiting for Fallen Earth, World of Darkness, Old Republic, FFXIV
star trek online and player crews...
Trammel. UO attempt to save subscriptions and make everyone happy. Tons of people ended up leaving and making their own classic servers.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
People were leaving due to gankers. Trammel came about to protect their own interests. When EQ came out, well, many people left.
Your attempts to spin this failed.
yeah alot of people left, but alot of people also joined. Trammal didnt end UO, but it was the beginning.
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
Actually you have it wrong about UO. Trammel actually boosted the playerbase because many could actually play without constantly getting ganked. The expansion Age of Shadows was the one that did in UO. The servers were up and down for over a month and the introduction of fancy weapons, armor and a unbalanced pvp with the new skills killed it.
But I have to agree with many other posters, bad expansion packs have been the culprit usually.
DAoC - Trials of Atlantis
Pretty much ended that games claim to glory with its artifact junk and some other stuff.
One that has been totally overlooked here.
Lineage II Gracia update - the removal of the level grind. That altered the game on every level.
A lot of other MMOs have slowly evolved away from how they originally were planned.
i think its still too early to tell if the gracia patch was necesarily bad. But yeah i agree it is a pretty big change. Time will tell if it was bad or not, but i have a feeling NCsoft is going to need to add ALOT more end game grinding areas.
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
City of heroes nerfs, any nerf, every nerf, especially energy transfer 4 YEARS after it was introduced. Nerfs cut their subscriptions by about half. A city of "semi-super" heroes.
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." -Edmund Burke
Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"
(Psalm 94:16)
interesting responses. I'll add another one Everquest and Planes of Power- which focused the game more around raiding and less about grouping. As well as other stuff.
IIRC the sub numbers actually doubled once they introduced Trammel.....True some of the hardcore might have left but alot of people joined that didnt like the brutal FFA PVP where they had no safety whatsoever......
While it added people, it was added due to the fact that people quit after getting ganked too much. It just get annoyed when people say trammel killed UO.
i think its still too early to tell if the gracia patch was necesarily bad. But yeah i agree it is a pretty big change. Time will tell if it was bad or not, but i have a feeling NCsoft is going to need to add ALOT more end game grinding areas.
Yeah, dunno if its bad yet either but it is "controversial" in the sense that L2 went from the poster boy of dull grind to easier then WoW.
Those are the type of players that play to level or collect items. Once thats done, nothing left to do so they leave within 7 months normally. What Trammel did was turn UO into a no risk game with a short life span for players. Previous to that we had competition for resources, etc etc. Much more exciting and better for long term gameplay.
Players who play the game as an immersive world are usually playing for years because there is no 'End game'.
For me it was AoC's over use of graphics which forced it into the ultimate instancing game. Kind of took the first M out of MMO in my eyes.
You always launch in november or december in order to maximize profit.
And one expansion pack each 12 to 18 months after launch.
OMG nobody is blameing wow for all them other games changing?!!
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
WoW is just an EQ clone. If you want to blame something you should blame EQ.
I think there were expansions that caused the game to jump the shark. The devs just ran out of ideas to make the game better, so they did something insanely drastic.
UO = Age of Shadows - completely turned the game into a gear-based game. It literally went from day to night in one expansion. It also had HUGE technical problems that disallowed a large portion of it's player base to even play any more. Half of my guild couldn't play for a month.
SWG = yeah, everyone knows..
DAoC = ToA.. turned a pvp game into a pve-eq game
WOW = The biggest flack it gets is because both expansion are just 'more of the same'. The problem is, if you look at the past history.. games are best not changing drastically. I think WOW adds just enough 'new' stuff to make the game interesting for players without changing so much that it alienates players (see the 3 above).
Then there are games that just were bad from launch
AOC = They pushed the graphics too high. Because of this they were forced to instance the entire game into really small pieces. That aside, they launched 6 months too early. If AOC was released in November, it would tear away a large portion of the Warhammer players. Launching bugged and unfinished, just means when the game is 'finished' players will never come back.
Warhammer = No plan to deal with faction imbalances. This game is going to be down to 100k subscribers very soon. The entire emphasis of the game is RvR, yet on 75% of their servers there is no RvR at all. One side completely dominates and the other side only does scenarios and PVE. This will turn the game (on most servers) into a pve game, which it is not equipped to be.
You can add the mini NGE of EQ2 as well, it was more subtle but got results in the end (the wrong ones).
Runescape = Removal of nearly all forms of PvP and direct person-to-person trade, forcing people to use the Auction-House-like "Exchange" instead, partly to prevent gold-buying and partly so that Jagex could control prices and "steer" the game, so to speak.
Having never played SWG or UO, these were definitely some of the largest, most devastating changes I have ever experienced. The game literally went from completely open, free-for-all, full loot (almost) PvP with open and unbiased trading, to a PvE grind-leveling game where you can't even give a simple potion to your own wife unless she gives you the potion's full value in return. The game was brought to its knees. It's estimated the game lost 25% of its total players (which number in the millions) within a month, and I know for a fact that at least 40% of their moderators (nearly 2000 players) resigned and quit the game within the first week.